Does powercreep as a phenomenom really exist?

Multiplayer Discussion
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I don’t think many of you would follow the full-length argument anyway, let alone agree with it, so might as well keep it short.

This thread gave me a perfect example of how some of the old cards, when used in the current meta, could be considered broken.

There, I was forced to remember and acknowledge the existence of “Poison seeds”, a 4-mana mass polymorph, literally. Well, slightly worse than Mass poly, but for 3 mana less, I’ll take it.

Anyway, I immediately delighted imagining using this against Druid’s full board of…everything, and figured, woah, wait a minute, this is actually too strong. This is one of the oldest cards ever printed, and it’s literally broken.

I never really bought into this whole powercreep story arc, for the simple reason because I’ve always understood what I’m about to tell you - when you change things, and then you make changes atop of those changes, you don’t get a changed primary thing. You get something which bears NO resemblance (or if it does bear resemblance, it’s completely accidental/random) with the primary thing.

You change the “quality”, not the “quantity”. You don’t change the stats of minions and damage of spells (only). You change the “quality” of minions and damage spells in general.

With that in mind, metas before and now can’t be directly compared, because their qualities have changed. We do not see “vanilla” statted minions anymore. We ONLY see minions with a keyword now, which are either overstatted (but with downsides) or understatted (with upsides). We do not see spells stronger than fireball when it comes to direct dmg face. What we actually observe are weaker ones, on average, but some of them have the potential to be stronger than fireball, in some specific situations which rarely come up in play.

What is considered powercreep is, in fact, just a temporary phase a cycle of updating the game goes through, with the other phase being the one we’re in at this very moment - deconstruction.

We deconstruct what’s strong in our meta, compare to the deconstructed previous expansions, and make a decision about balance and future release which will depend on the results of the analysis. We can either nerf this meta more, or buff it a bit, to put it in line with the previous (and the future ones). Either way, we change the quality of it, because that change came on top of a change that came on top of a change…

and so on, until 2014, classic cards.

It’s apples and oranges, and it goes in a cycle. At this very moment, we’re not even in the “powercreep” phase of it all, and even if we were, it’d be a short, temporary state of the game.

EDIT: By “deconstructing”, I mean that we’re in a phase where archetypes are made quite literal, direct, one-dimensional - extremely so; for example, aggro decks either flood board instantly now (shamans) or they stack up direct dmg source fast and don’t even bother controlling the board (weapon rogue, Attack DH); OTK decks put you down turn 5-6-7, control decks burn through your whole deck while having infinite ramping demons coming out of their decks. In this phase, we observe the limits of each of the archetypes.

In the next phase, we build on top of that, by mixing up the supports for different archetypes to allow for different, not-so-bare-bone strategies, and that’s the phase more closely resembling what everyone calls “powercreep”, as crazy, not-so-easily-foreseen synergies come to surface.

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Very good post. i saw that card in other thread and thought the same, how nice it may be in current day.

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That’s my comment he has quoted when I was asking about the name of the card I was looking for but the card it self isn’t power creep. Power creep does exist regardless of feelings blizzard made certain cards to ramp up the power. Certain classes have it. Durid does power creep dishing out big minions by increasing the mana making it a short game by turn 5 if done correctly. These minion cards are old from the earily expansion you can find in nuetral section. Durid got a buff later on with a hero card that allows the player to dish out big minions very earily on with the hero power + spell to increase the total mana. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 12 mana cost big minions will come out in turn 5 by using the 4 mana spell card to increase by two mana on turn 4. Giving turn 5 6 mana. Durid also have a hand increase so when you combine all of this with all of thier mana increase spells done in order from less to more the Durid is in a good postion.

Every card is still useable many people of now don’t know how to deal with it just like the old days.

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And yet, most of his threats can be removed with that common spell which costs 4 mana.

He plays Dungar for 9, which brings 27 more mana on the board, but you can deal with all of that for just 4 mana.

And that’s by using one of the oldest cards ever printed.

He can only set up board 2 times. You use Poison Seeds 2 times. He concedes.

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Yet you can bait the person to use it while Durid contuines to win. There’s ways to deal with it. Baiting a Warlock of 8 mana twisting is no different. The card itself isn’t what you are saying it to be milling the deck takes care of it.

Durid can set up more than 2 boards at a time notice the time leap I mention of cards then apply it to rest of the expasions that came out with more ways to do it. It was never nerf because the game was new adding more cards later on.

I understand you don’t like that card but there’s ways to couter earily on when more expansion were release after the first 2. The card is powerful but it has flaws. That’s my main point.

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You’re speaking from a Wild perspective. I’m talking about Standard ranked perspective. We don’t have this card allowed, and we don’t have milling anymore.

But yeah, I suppose you could say that Wild is powercrept. If that’s your word of choice :smiley: I prefer Wild :smiley:

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Personal opnion here.

It exists but It isn’t as batlantly as people think in this game.
Devs do actual effort to not powercreep the game but It is like aging.

That because you have to maintain things interesting and this usually means one number up here , one less mana there.

Take festival of legends as an example of a set with little to no powercreep. Is that what people really want to play ?

People saying that powercreep is not under Control are the dummies here. It is but we are talking about 10 years worth of powercreep.
It is a miracle that our metagame isn’t turn 0 OTKs at this point.

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Wasn’t it you who were trying to convince me in another thread, than an one-drop 999/999 would not be a power creep issue? Because that was pretty wrong.

PS You started saying things like “but I would counter it round 2”, which isn’t solving anything since it just shows it turns the game dull and too simplistic.

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And It isn’t.

It is a issue on a design level at best and even there exists the argument that a bad designed card is bad design despite of being weak or strong.

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The game is the cards. You make it 999/999 one-drops and one-drops that remove minions next turn and you have a lame game.

It reminds of a bad Tavern Brawl.

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Wild of course, but at the time it was introduced their was not enough support to make it op, but now you can introduce other cards from other expansions.

But its still weaker then say double Reno’s. Poison seed decks tend to be weak in other ways and if then turn your deck into 7x2+2 instead of 7x8+8 you still can win as it is still 14 damage a turn. now if they are running 500+ armour and double wild seed that is much more of a pain.

as a indication of power creep, wild prior the nerf to the recent nerf standard was largely running standard decks and winning with them at say plat 1-5

they nerfed standard and all those decks pretty much disappeared from wild.

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“I found a (over/under)powered (old/new) card” is not an argument against the existence of power creep. It’s not about individual cards, it’s the strength of decks as a whole. And, for sure, decks have gotten way stronger overall.

Total board state strength, mass removal, card draw, and mana cost reduction/ramp have all skyrocketed over the years. It’s not uncommon for one player to play a lethal-threat board state every turn for several turns in a row, only to have it removed every turn staving off the defeat once more. That kind of thing just did not happen in the old days.

Sure, there has always been the big combo finishers, but not with the ability to easily draw out your deck by turn six with reliability for multiple classes.

Even the nastiest combos used to require fishing out the one-of Emperor Thaurissan, without tutors or discovers to target it, playing it and effectively doing nothing for a turn, not subsequently getting killed, and then a combo could go off. Nowadays most combo decks just need to draw any cards, lots of them, to get enough tools to get a combo to work, rather than the combo that requires an Exodia-style hand to execute.

Hearthstone used to be a fencing match, with feints and lunges and parries and counterattacks. Card efficiency and getting value out of them mattered. When you only had one or two mass removal spells, timing them appropriately mattered. One-for-one or two-for-one out of your card could swing the trajectory of the entire match.

Now, Hearthstone is more like a duel at twenty paces with rocket launchers, where whoever fires first wins and you don’t have to aim.

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Sometimes you don’t even need to think “decks” to see there is power creep. E.g. a card was 8 mana no effects just a body and now it may destroy at least 3 cards on the board and deck and hand of the opponent which is pretty brutal. Thinking decks is obviously the more complete approach but such brutality can often put the point even more easily across because it precisely implies “we didn’t even need to think ‘decks’ to see that card is power creeped”.

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Didn’t read the full post because I was too lazy to do it but I’ll just say that powercreep’s existence is hard to deny per se.

Powercreep is a natural process of power inflation that affects most TCGs (even most live games in general). It’s the same concept as stats inflation in wow. When you add new layers of content without removing the older one, you need the new layer of content to be more effective than the older one so players actually go and play it. This isn’t as straightforward in TCGs as is in wow, because power level is relative and new cards can just fill out blanks in gameplay instead of being more powerful, but overtime this effect tends to become more noticeable.

It can be scaled back through some harsh and painful changes to lots of cards or by essentially releasing garbage for a while, but in the end the fact is powercreep is a zero-sum game. Game length hasn’t actually increased since the classic days even with years of powercreep. When everything is powercreeped by the same amount, the gameplay just bloats. A 1 mana 30/30 is removed by a 0 mana single target removal and that powercreep is cancelled out.

The only real problem with powercreep is that mistakes or bad luck become much more punishing. Not finding an answer to a 3/3 in turn 3 in 2015 isn’t as big of a deal than not finding an answer to 3 3/3s in turn 3 in 2024. An arms race definitely has happened and we are now throwing missiles at each other instead of rocks.

The transform card you point out isn’t really an exception. It’s true it would be really good in the current meta, but that’s just because transforming minions today is a lot more impactful than in the past (because minions are far stronger now). That doesn’t mean powercreep hasn’t happened, it proves exactly the opposite. Things are so much stronger now, that turning an unkilliax into a 2/2 for 4 mana is actually much better than what this card was doing in the past.

The argument isn’t whether powercreep exists or not (it does). The question is whether it’s as important or problematic as people say it is.

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Only because Players are impatient and Executives greedy so they satisfy them. The core reason powercreep exists is that Players are lazy to learn new cards. A new expansion on true balance is practically “worse” for a few days at least because people haven’t made netdecks for it.

Vicious Syndicate and others who pretend to be experts are very guilty of doing game-destructive propaganda: they advertise expansions are weak first day without waiting for people to optimize any netdecks yet.

Those people always fail to make a homebrew that becomes netdeck (long-term) and they have the audacity to push for powercreep before an expansion or miniset is even live.

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This is the only thing I agree with from your whole post xD

Faced with just first couple of replies, it immediately occured to me that I exaggarated - yes, powercreep does exist, I just don’t think it’s significant in Standard.

I smell a paradox, eh. This is the main issue I have with powercreep: the meaning of it is understood as a trend according to which newer cards get progressively stronger, because otherwise they wouldn’t have been used at all.

And I say, sure, you can powercreep a few expansions, but then what? Then rotation happens, and voila, we’re back to beginning, no powercreep state.

It’s only powercreep when you take into account old cards, of which most aren’t even available in Standard, but then we have a paradox, because it’s the OLD cards that are too broken for current meta, and not the other way around.

It’s confusing. Almost like it’s something else entirely, but somehow people keep parrotting “Powercreep! Powercreep!” like God himself came down from Paradise.

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When a release is not very power creeped “experts” like Vicious Syndicate harm the game when they advertise to Devs to power creep it.

In most cases people think it’s power creeped when in reality there are just no good netdecks yet but there will be soon in all likelihood.

Those people always fail to turn their homebrews into netdecks and they have the audacity to promote powercreeping.

PS e.g. look at happened with Oracle. Everyone there was crying the expansion is weak and it’s clearly not.

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They are right. This expansion is the weakest release in years and pretty much the only card that works is Oracle. This isn’t a question of deck refinement and VS isn’t supposed (or even trying) to give you the most refined netdeck in their deckbuilding articles. They just produce deck ideas, some better than others. No one can produce before an expansion release the kind of refined deck lists that hundreds of players and data produce. You’re just saying nonesense here Carnivore I’m sorry.

This expansion should have been buffed to the high heavens and oracle should have been nerfed to the ground because it promotes a hideous gameplay pattern of cycle, burst damage from hand no one likes to see in this game. They have done the opposite and the game stinks as a consequence. Between VS’ opinion and yours I’m taking VS’ tbh.

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Again, that one card shouldn’t be used to assess power level of the game. No one card should. Oracle should have been nerfed, should never have been printed at its current power.

The rest of GDB is borderline meme tier, and it’s that way because of the strength of other expansions it was competing with.

Even the devs have said they want to scale back and that GDB was intended as a step in that direction.

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Absolute nonsense. People are playing The Ceaseless Expanse left and right and the same is true for Kil’jaeden (possibly the best late-game card in the game) and Exarch Naiele too and those are only from checking 3 seconds the database and only for legendary (I probably miss several).

VS and their Stans are acting like spoiled brats because they took their Reno toy away.

Maybe VS should live for a year without brutal power creep like Reno’s,

maybe they’ll learn how to make a netdeck for the 1st time.